I am the river

Water is basic. Physically, we're a sort of tenuous framework of bone and muscle swimming in a sea of water. It doesn't just move through us, it IS us. It fills our tissues and allows them to function, including the brain, but the water doesn't just service our more solid parts; that life-- our existence-- goes on in the liquid as much as the solid. A river is always flowing through us, but it doesn't wash us away, miraculously, we stay ourselves.

Well, most of us. Think how vulnerable that makes us. Me in particular, of course. As I've said before, I can't find a kind of water I don't neurologically react badly to, now. This MCS of mine means that I *don't* stay myself, when the chemicals and/or minerals I react to (but which most of you don't) churn and rush into me, through the open floodgates. It gets into every cell, of course, including brain cells. It changes what and who I am, and how I experience. I'm... less. Along with more of the horrible "electrified" effects, I feel and think with much less depth. Less of me is there. It's as if more brain function must be needed, to generate a full personality, and I've only got a fraction of what's needed. One thing that isn't diminished is a sense of horror at having this happen to me, with fewer and fewer breaks, as the years go on, and how increasingly disabling it is. Part of this horror is from the obscene amount of lost time. Every day or year spent like this is dead time I can't get back.

There's a movie, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". I forget if I've actually seen it, but the title certainly leapt out at me... You could not come up with a better description. It's one thing to suffer (and that word definitely applies to me, without a single drop of melodrama), in the usual sense. It's yet another layer of suffering on top of that one, though, when you can't feel and process and experience your own existence properly. The toxic overload, whatever environmental chemicals are involved, makes me into a half-person. I'm a "lighter" thing, disconnected, empty. It's like walking around half-dead, except the symptoms, pain etc, are experienced fully. After months then years of this, after people have seen me "thin out" and get duller, even I can't help looking at myself as nothing, because if the depth doesn't return, it's a sort of fait accompli... I AM some dull, inconsequential half-person. I think I'm in the process of losing valued friends because of this.

By the way, anyone who insists on treating this as psychological not neurological... psychological problems involve mood changes, not shallowing of emotion. Also, my sanity and judgment aren't impaired. Chemical sensitivities are real, and affect many people, with doctors' practices and support groups devoted to it. Psychological problems aren't triggered by light or environmental exposures such as chemicals in water. It's just the awkward language I'm forced to use, to describe a nearly indescribable state, that encourages the confusion. Actually, all it would take is for someone to experience what I do for fifteen seconds, to end the "psychological" talk... unfortunately, it's not in my power to make that happen.